$13.16$13.16
FREE delivery:
April 15 - 16
Ships from: Gulf Coast Books LLC Sold by: Gulf Coast Books LLC
$5.90
Other Sellers on Amazon
& FREE Shipping
87% positive over last 12 months
FREE Shipping
100% positive over last 12 months
FREE Shipping
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Audible sample Sample
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) Paperback – September 18, 2012
Purchase options and add-ons
“[Kaling is] like Tina Fey’s cool little sister. Or perhaps . . . the next Nora Ephron.”—The New York Times
Mindy Kaling has lived many lives: the obedient child of immigrant professionals, a timid chubster afraid of her own bike, a Ben Affleck–impersonating Off-Broadway performer and playwright, and, finally, a comedy writer and actress prone to starting fights with her friends and coworkers with the sentence “Can I just say one last thing about this, and then I swear I’ll shut up about it?”
Perhaps you want to know what Mindy thinks makes a great best friend (someone who will fill your prescription in the middle of the night), or what makes a great guy (one who is aware of all elderly people in any room at any time and acts accordingly), or what is the perfect amount of fame (so famous you can never get convicted of murder in a court of law), or how to maintain a trim figure (you will not find that information in these pages). If so, you’ve come to the right book, mostly!
With several conveniently placed stopping points for you to run errands and make phone calls, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? proves that Mindy Kaling really is just a Girl Next Door—not so much literally anywhere in the continental United States, but definitely if you live in India or Sri Lanka.
Praise for Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?
“Where have you been all our lives, Mindy?”—Glamour
“Who wouldn’t want to hang out with Mindy Kaling? . . . [Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?] is like a mash note to comedy nerds.”—Time Out New York
“Very funny.”—Boston Globe
- Print length222 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherCrown
- Publication dateSeptember 18, 2012
- Dimensions5.2 x 0.65 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100307886271
- ISBN-13978-0307886279
- Lexile measure1010L
"Layla" by Colleen Hoover for $7.19
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Colleen Hoover comes a novel that explores life after tragedy and the enduring spirit of love. | Learn more
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may ship from close to you
- One friend with whom you have a lot in common is better than three with whom you struggle to find things to talk about.Highlighted by 3,898 Kindle readers
- As my mom has said, when one person is unhappy, it usually means two people are unhappy but that one has not come to terms with it yet.Highlighted by 3,057 Kindle readers
- One good thing about New York is that most people function daily while in a low-grade depression.Highlighted by 1,536 Kindle readers
Editorial Reviews
Review
“[Kaling’s] comedic chops certainly shine throughout the book—as if we need more proof of her talent.”—HuffPost
“Kaling doles out neurotic charm and hilarious every-woman musings.”—Elle
“She’s like Tina Fey’s cool little sister. Or perhaps… the next Nora Ephron.” —The New York Times
“The fashion opinions of Kelly Kapoor mixed with a Miss Manners-esque advice column.”—Entertainment Weekly
“If you love Kelly and think the three minutes or so allotted her on episodes of The Office are too few, you can take home Mindy.”—The New Yorker
“Is anyone else kind of sold on the genius title alone?” —Nylon
“Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) is hilarious and relatable—just like Kaling’s classic Tweets.” —Ladies Home Journal
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t chubby. Like being Indian, being chubby feels like it is just part of my permanent deal. I remember being in first grade, in Mrs. Gilmore’s class at Fiske Elementary School, and seeing that Ashley Kemp, the most popular girl in our class, weighed only thirty-seven pounds. We knew this because we weighed her on the industrial postal scale they kept in the teacher’s supply closet. I was so envious. I snuck into the supply closet later that same day to weigh myself. I was a whopping sixty-eight pounds.
Some of the first math I understood was that I was closer to twice Ashley’s weight than to her weight.
“Don’t be closer to twice a friend’s weight than to her actual weight,” I told myself. This little mantra has helped me stave off obesity for more than two decades.
My mom’s a doctor, but because she came from India and then Africa, where childhood obesity was not a problem, she put no premium on having skinny kids. In fact, she and my dad didn’t mind having a chubby daughter. Part of me wonders if it even made them feel a little prosperous, like Have you seen our overweight Indian child? Do you know how statistically rare this is? It will then not come as a surprise to you that I’ve never been thin in my life—except the day I was born, when I was six pounds.
It’s a small point of pride that I was a six-pound baby, because from my limited understanding of baby weights, that’s on the skinnier side. I flaunt my low baby weight the way really obese people must flaunt their dainty, small feet. It’s my sole claim to skinny fame.
As you can see, from then on, however, it was full-speed-ahead food paradise! In grade school, I would vacillate along the spectrum from chubby to full-on fat until I was about fourteen. Being overweight is so common in America and comes in so many forms that you can’t just call someone “fat” and have the reasonable expectation anyone will understand you. Here’s the breakdown:
Chubby: A regular-size person who could lose a few, for whom you feel affection.
Chubster: An overweight, adorable child. That kid from Two and a Half Men for the first couple of years.
Fatso: An antiquated term, really. In the 1970s, mean sorority girls would call a pledge this. Probably most often used on people who aren’t even really fat, but who fear being fat.
Fatass: Not usually used to describe weight, actually. This deceptive term is more a reflection of one’s laziness. In the writers’ room of The Office, an upper-level writer might get impatient and yell, “Eric, take your fat ass and those six fatasses and go write this B-story! I don’t want to hear any more excuses why the plot doesn’t make sense!”
Jabba the Hutt: Star Wars villain. Also, something you can call yourself after a particularly filling Thanksgiving dinner that your aunts and uncles will all laugh really hard at.
Obese: A serious, nonpejorative way to describe someone who is unhealthily overweight.
Obeseotron: A nickname you give to someone you adore who has just stepped on your foot accidentally, and it hurts. Alternatively, a fat robot.
Overweight: When someone is roughly thirty pounds too heavy for his or her frame.
Pudgy: See “Chubby.”
Pudgo: See “Chubster.”
Tub o’ Lard: A huge compliment given by Depression-era people to other, less skinny people.
Whale: A really, really mean way that teen boys target teen girls. See the following anecdote.
Duante Diallo
There have been two times in my life—ages fourteen and nineteen—when I lost a ton of weight over a short period of time. At fourteen, I lost the weight because of Duante Diallo.
In ninth grade, my class was made up mostly of the same kids with whom I had gone to middle school, with the exception of about twenty splashy new students. One of those students was Duante.
Duante Diallo was a handsome kid from Senegal who’d moved to Boston to play basketball for our school. He was immediately the star forward of our varsity basketball team. We had a not-great artsy-private-school basketball team, the kind made up of slender boys whose primary goal was to seem well-rounded for college applications. But you could tell Duante would’ve been the star of even a really good team. He was beloved by teachers because he was a brave kid for being so far away from his parents, and beloved by students because he was good-looking, a jock, and had an interesting African accent. Also, people couldn’t believe the stuff he had done in Senegal, like smoke, drive a car, have sex, live in a village, and hold a gun. When he was introduced at a student assembly, he chose to give a short speech where he taught us a sports cheer in Senegalese. In the hallways, small crowds would form around Duante as he shared stories from his past. Once he shot a cow with an AK-47. He was so popular you could barely look at him without being blinded by cool.
Duante was also, unfortunately, a tyrannical asshole. Maybe I should have gleaned this from the joy with which he told the story about murdering a cow with a massive gun. He fixated on me early in the year as being overweight and was open with his observations. At first it had the veneer of niceness. For example, once I was getting a drink of water in the hallway where he and his friends were standing.
Duante: You would actually be really pretty if you lost weight.
His face was gentle and earnest, as though what he had really said was, “You remind me of a sunset in my native Senegal.” It was confusing. All I could muster as a reply to this insulting comment was “thank you.” I was hurt, but I rationalized that maybe Duante had been around only extremely thin African girls his whole third-world life and didn’t know American girls had access to refrigeration, and that we didn’t have to divide up UN food parcels with our neighbors. (This may have been a tad racist an assumption on my part. Look, we were both in the wrong.)
By winter, I had not lost any weight, and in fact had gained about ten more pounds. This really bothered Duante. I think he felt he had gone out of his way to give me some valuable advice and I had chosen not to follow it, therefore insulting him. One day in February, I walked into the freshmen center, he stopped mid-conversation with his friends and gestured to me.
Duante: Speaking of whales . . .
I don’t even think they’d been talking about whales. The guys all laughed, but even I could tell some felt guilty doing it. I had been friends with most of them since we were kids. Danny Feinstein, who was my Latin study buddy, came up to me later that afternoon and told me that “What Duante said wasn’t cool.” He had a stoic look of noble do-gooder, although he had said nothing at the time of the insult. Again, I was forced to say thank you. How I continually found myself in situations where I felt I had to say thank you to mean guys, I’m not sure.
It was a tough winter. I had gone from competitive, bookish nerd to nervous target. If this was Heathers, I was Martha Dumptruck and this mean African kid was all three Heathers. I turned my obsessive teenage energy away from reading Mad magazine and focused on my diet. I didn’t have access to a lot of weight-loss resources, because this was pre-Internet. There was one Weight Watchers near us, but it shared a mini-mall parking lot with a sketchy Salvation Army, and my parents didn’t like the idea of taking me there for meetings. So I invented a makeshift diet formula: I would eat exactly half of what was put in front of me, and no dessert. Without exercising, I lost thirty pounds in about two months. A janitor at school whom I liked, Mrs. Carrington, would see me and say, “Damn, you’ve got a metabolism on you, don’t you girl?” The janitors were always in my corner.
I remember waking up in the morning and looking down at my fingers and seeing they had shrunk overnight. Suddenly I was freezing all the time, like those skinny girls in movie theaters are always complaining about, and needed to sleep with an extra wool blanket. My face thinned out, and my belly went away. I stopped wearing oversize college sweatshirts and corduroy pants with elastic waists. Light brown lines appeared on my upper inner arms that looked like little rivers headed to my shoulder blades. I actually thought they looked pretty, until my mom told me they were stretch marks from losing so much weight so fast. It was like a Disney sci-fi movie. Mom was impressed but didn’t want me to go overboard, which was impossible, because I was still eating a lot. I just had taken a break from eating like a professional football player. I loved all the side effects of losing the weight, but the reason I did it was so that Duante would stop making fun of me, so I could hang out in the freshmen center again, and not where I had been: across the street in the Fairy Woods.
I thought Duante would finally leave me alone, but he didn’t. One day I was walking down the hallway to class and passed Duante and his group of friends.
Duante: Remember when Mindy was like (blowing out his cheeks to make a fat face) a whale?
They all laughed. Come on, dude. Remember when? I’m getting made fun of because I used to be fat? The laws of bullying allow you to be cruel even when the victim had made strides for improvement? This is when I realized that bullies have no code of conduct.
Lucky for me, Duante was a bad student. English was his second language and that made everything harder for him. I delighted in the fact that he had to go to the middle school to take some of his classes. Sophomore year he broke his leg when he slipped during practice and collided with another student. For a short time he was even more popular, as sports injuries tend to make people, but then soon enough his crutches were tedious to people when he was slow-moving and hard to get around in the hallway. He didn’t play that season, and was never as good at basketball after the injury. He dropped out junior year, and I heard he got a girl pregnant. Part of me now feels a little bad for Duante Diallo, but not at the time. I was so happy. That fucking mean Senegalese kid.
An Intervention
I stayed at a pretty normal weight until college, when I put on the freshman thirty-five in the first six months. What’s that? You’ve never heard of the freshman thirty-five? That’s funny, because neither had my parents, who welcomed me home on spring vacation with mild horror. I was a vaguely familiar food monster who had eaten their daughter.
When I lost weight at nineteen, it was significant because that is when I first started exercising. I had always successfully avoided exercise as a kid, by being an extra in school plays, or signing up for fake-y sports like Tai Chi, or manipulating gym teachers into letting me read books in the bleachers. So it was at Dartmouth College, in 1999, that I discovered exercise when my best friend, Brenda, taught me how to run. I was a sloth upon whom Brenda took pity, and she saved me from near-obesity with the patience and tenacity of Annie Sullivan, the Miracle Worker.
Our workout routine was simple and mind-numbingly repetitive, an atmosphere in which I flourished, oddly. I started out walking for twenty minutes, and then Bren would make me do little spurts of running between lampposts or street signs. (For the record, Bren, a natural athlete, runs, like, a six-minute mile. This was an absolute waste of time for her. She was just doing this out of her well-brought-up Catholic kindness.) Then we’d come back to our apartment and do Abs of Steel together. Even though we mercilessly made fun of the video, which was from the deep eighties and included Tamilee Webb wearing aqua bike shorts and a pink thong leotard, we did it religiously. Tamilee had a rock-hard butt, and there was nothing ironic about it. The whole experience was surprisingly fun and cemented a friendship between Brenda and me for life. How can you not make a best friend out of a girl who has seen the sweat-soaked pelvis area of your gym pants, daily, and who still chooses to spend time with you? In this safe and friendly setting, I lost thirty pounds in a semester.
I Love Diets
I wish I could just be one of those French women you read about who stays thin by eating only the most gourmet foods in tiny, ascetic proportions, but I could never do that. First of all, I largely don’t like gourmet food. I like frozen yogurt. I think it tastes better than ice cream. I love diet soda; when I drink juice or regular soda it makes my blood sugar spike and I act like a cracked out Rachael Ray, but without the helpful household tips. I even like margarine, though everyone tells me it’s basically poison or whatever. So, that’s one thing I have going against me. Another obstacle is that my pattern is to eat exactly as much as whoever is hanging out with me, and between boyfriends and my tall athletic friends, we’re a bunch of huge eaters. I really do have a remarkable appetite. I remember when the news reports came out about Michael Phelps’s ten-thousand-calorie-a-day diet, and everyone was so shocked. But I just thought, yep, I could do that, no problem.
Ultimately, the main reasons why I will be chubby for life are (1) I have virtually no hobbies except dieting. I can’t speak any non-English languages, knit, ski, scrapbook, or cook. I have no pets. I don’t know how to do drugs. I lost my passport three years ago when I moved into my house and never got it renewed. Video games scare me because they all seem to simulate situations I’d hate to be in, like war or stealing cars. So if I ever lost weight I would also lose my only hobby; (2) I have no discipline; I’m like if Private Benjamin had never toughened up but, in fact, got worse; (3) Guys I’ve dated have been into me the way I am; and (4) I’m pretty happy with the way I look, so long as I don’t break a beach chair.
My love for dieting is a recent realization. It turns out I have a passion for trying out new eating plans and exercises. Dukan, South Beach, French Women Don’t Get Fat, Cavemen Don’t Get Fat, Single-Celled Organisms Don’t Get Fat, Skinny Bitch, Skinny Wretch—after a while on one regimen, I get bored and want to try a new one. It’s actually fun for me to read all the material and testimonials of the tan, shammy doctors who stand by the diets medically. It’s only a matter of time before the Jane Austen Diet comes out, and I’m really looking forward to spending a spring adhering to that one.
Product details
- Publisher : Crown; 0 edition (September 18, 2012)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 222 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0307886271
- ISBN-13 : 978-0307886279
- Lexile measure : 1010L
- Item Weight : 6.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.2 x 0.65 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #268,217 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #666 in Humor Essays (Books)
- #2,565 in Actor & Entertainer Biographies
- #8,262 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Mindy Kaling is an actor, writer, producer, and director. She wrote and stars in the film Late Night, and is currently at work on a collection of essays coming to Amazon Original Stories in summer 2020.
Mindy is the author of two New York Times best-selling memoirs, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me (And Other Concerns) and Why Not Me?, and recently starred in the film Ocean's 8. She's the writer and producer of the TV series Four Weddings and a Funeral, coming to Hulu in summer 2019, and is also working on a coming-of-age comedy series for Netflix.
She is known for her work as the creator and star of The Mindy Project, and for her years on the critically acclaimed, Emmy Award-winning NBC show The Office. In addition to producing, directing, and portraying the celebrity-obsessed Kelly Kapoor, Mindy's Office credits include writing the Emmy-nominated "Niagara," along with twenty-four other episodes.
Mindy was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2012. In 2014, she was named one of Glamour's Women of the Year.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
This past week of Christmas felt like a cannonball run over a 5 day period. We are a couple of SINKs (like a DINK but I'm finishing up my MFA, so...) who often are expected to do the traveling between many states within a very hasty, intense, hyper-caloric-infused, few crazy days to see both sides of our family. Generally, this means we travel by car and spend a LOT of time behind the wheel trying not to kill each other out of boredom.
What made this year really nutty and unique was that we could ONLY afford to travel by car after recently moving to the DC area. Our families live in both Upstate New York and Vermont and to not see them would grant us an automatic fail in their books (not really, but we sometimes wonder as first-borns). As mentioned before, we don’t have kids (often an opportunistic, golden-ticket for not traveling) and our furry, pissed-off cat will not grant us any pass.
We do love our family, and we do want to see them, but 10 to 12 consecutive hours in the car, confronting an ice-storm no less, is tough. Real tough. And if anyone knows what it’s like to travel during the holiday season by car, it can sometimes feel like you’re crazy-town-banana-pants, weaving in and out of lanes of people paying attention to nothing, but crooning their Christmas Carols on their iPod. Why their iPod? Other than convenience, if you travel the routes we have to, typically, you’re driving through radio deadzones with nothing more than three choices: static, Christian Rock or Rod Stewart. No slam to born-again lyrics or Stewartness, they both have their place, but I cannot personally handle too much exposure to either for a lengthy period of time. We also did not have an iPod.
At some point during the leg of the trip, my wife, in the passenger seat, snickered while looking down at her Kindle. I asked her what was so funny. She shrugged it off and continued to read. After realizing my wife and I know a lot about each other, and mooning truck drivers while driving was out of the question, I looked for ANY WAY to be entertained for the rest of the day during our first leg of travel. So I proceeded to pry and she informed me it was simply something silly that Mindy said in her book. She then offered to read the passage out loud. I chuckled. The style of Mindy’s telling of an event in her life was very well written and humorous. Next thing you know, my wife and I were laughing the hours away, practically in tears, as she re-read the book orally, front to back, for the remainder of the trip.
What makes this book so great is how truthful Mindy shares her anecdotes. She’s smart, witty and honest. At first glance, things felt very arbitrary and self-centered, but in fact, so are we and what we pay attention to from time to time. She provided a great balance of what you’d expect - “this is Mindy’s path to success” - with a very humanistic, modest look at her past. She teaches us how parents will continue to be an interesting influence in our choices, how success is sometimes “I got lucky”, and then throws in smatterings of “So here are some selfies I found on my blackberry”. Random? Yes. Relatable? Completely. Made me think of ridiculous things in my past and that maybe I’m on the right path to what I would consider success.
So aside from greatly improving upon our lively experience during our trip to Vermont, Mindy gave me perspective. I don’t read as much as my wife does, but if many books were written like Mindy’s, I’d probably read a lot more of them. And who knows… Maybe even make it a tradition that my wife is to read out loud during our annual cannonball run. We’ll probably even save crazy-town-Bossy-Pants for next Christmas.
The book covers a healthy variety of topics, from Mindy's squeaky-clean, high achieving childhood to her post-college days living in cramped quarters with her best friends making ends meet in New York, to her professional growth on The Office and beyond. The stories she tells are vibrant and often very funny, and written in a self-referential style.
I found it refreshing that she was not jaded nor depressed (not that there's a PROBLEM with that, but that it seems almost all comedians have a dark side or period of depression/drug abuse). At the same time, she was brutally honest about parts of her life that worked, parts that didn't, and times where she could/should have worked a little harder (cough cough...Conan). She also shared some great philosophies on life, such as that if you can't find a character that's a good fit for you, you have to CREATE one (like she did with Matt & Ben, and now with The Mindy Project). She also has beautiful passages about her family and what she wants in romantic relationships, which I found realistic and heartening.
Just a few negatives: like many others, I wish that she had provided more detail of her transition between NYC and LA - it was a stark change without very much description. I also felt that her self-portraits were totally unnecessary and not that funny. That being said, I like that she is confident enough to throw that in there just because she wants to! There's an utterly un-filtered element to her writing which some might find solipsistic, but I find refreshing.
I find Mindy to be a fascinating bundle of contradictions. We know she has an insane work ethic and works 16+ hour days on The Mindy Project as writer, creator, lead actress, and producer, yet she fully admits to being lazy at different parts of the book (from her Conan internship to SNL to the times when she gets a week to write an episode for The Office). She seems to fervently want what her parents have (a mature companionship), yet she didn't start dating "men rather than boys" until her 30s (which seems late for someone who is very self-aware and knows what they want). That being said, I love that she is not afraid to present herself unfettered, contradictions and all - it's quite a fun whirlwind to read. I hope she writes a follow up!
Top reviews from other countries
I have skimmed through the pages of the book but appears to be a very fast entertaining read.